SDMX

SDMX, which stands for Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange is an international initiative that aims at standardising and modernising (“industrialising”) the mechanisms and processes for the exchange of statistical data and metadata among international organisations and their member countries.[1]

These organisations are the main players at world and regional levels in the collection of official statistics in a large variety of domains (agriculture statistics, economic and financial statistics, social statistics, environment statistics etc.).

The latest version of the SDMX – SDMX 2.1 – was released in May 2011[2], and was approved by ISO as International Standard (ISO 17369:2013) [3] in 2013.

People who are new to SDMX are invited to consult the “Learning about SDMX Basics” page which will provide them with the necessary basic material for understanding SDMX.

Users who are already familiar with the SDMX standard will find on the SDMX.org website all material, such as the technical standards and guidelines necessary for properly implementing SDMX in a statistical domain.

Contents

SDMX message formats have two basic expressions, SDMX-ML (using XML syntax) and SDMX-EDI (using EDIFACT syntax and based on the GESMES/TS statistical message). The standards also include additional specifications (e.g. registry specification, web services). Version 1.0 of the SDMX standard has been recognised as an ISO standard in 2005.[4] The RDF Data Cube vocabulary implements the cube model underlying SDMX as Linked Data.[5]

There exist a number of free tools for conversion, visualisation and validation of SDMX, as well as free implementations of the SDMX registry. An overview of the available tools by function and source is available in the tools section of the SDMX web site.

SdmxSource is a Java implementation of the SDMX standard supporting SDMX-ML 2.1, 2.0, 1.0 and SDMX-EDI.